What’s
Wrong Today:
“The struggle of man against
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” – Milan Kundera
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre. The Massacre was the result of a strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I),
owned by John
D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and
the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).
The strike
resulted in the violent deaths of at least 19 people; reported death tolls vary,
but included two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death in a
tent that passed for a home. The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between striking
workers and a private militia hired by Rockefeller. The face-off raged on for
14 hours, during which the miners’ tent colony came under machine gun fire. The
tents were ultimately torched by the militia.
According
to the Lawyersgunsandmoney
blog:
also well-armed (both to protect themselves against the strikebreakers and to
protect their jobs from scabs) [and] fought back bravely, but could not match
the machine guns of the CF&I forces. That evening, a train conductor
stopped his train between the strikers and the private army, allowing most of
the residents to escape into the nearby hills
Rockefeller
was widely blamed by the public for the deaths. The strike was organized by the
United Mine Workers of America
(UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado.
In
retaliation for Ludlow, armed miners attacked dozens of mines over the next ten
days, engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard. Estimates
vary, but the entire conflict cost between 69 and 199 lives. It has been
described as the deadliest strike in the history of the US.
The Ludlow
Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Howard Zinn
in The
Politics of History described the Ludlow Massacre as:
of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men
in American history
The Ludlow
Massacre quickly evolved into a national rallying cry for labor unions and
eventually helped lead to New Deal labor reforms. But over the years, the
tragedy in Ludlow Colorado has been largely forgotten.
It may seem like ancient history, but in 1913, workers were not
paid for traveling into the mines, shoring up the mine ceilings, or fixing
tools. Many died in mine cave-ins or from disease. Workers lived in
company towns. Moreover, company housing meant that CF&I agents could enter
your home at any time, you had to shop at the company store using company
scrip, and company thugs ruled the camp, firing anyone associated with
unionism.
The United
Mine Workers of America had organized the workers in southern Colorado
throughout the early 1910s, despite significant efforts at repression. The workforce
was comprised of large numbers of Greeks, Mexicans, and Italians, a practice which discouraged communication that might lead to organization.
In 1913,
the union presented their demands to CF&I for basic working and human
rights, including an 8-hour day, the right to choose their own homes and
doctors, a pay raise, and enforcement of mine safety laws to CF&I. The
company rejected them out of hand, and the miners went on strike, and the
Massacre was the result.
The Ludlow Massacre
occurred at the end of the Gilded
Age, a period spanning the final three decades of the nineteenth
century; from the 1870s to 1900. The term comes from a book by Mark Twain, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,
satirizing what he believed to be an
era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gilding of gold.
Consider what John
D. Rockefeller Jr. said
to his Colorado miners in 1915 after the anger over the Massacre had died down: (emphasis
by the Wrongologist)
in a way. Capital can’t get along without you men, and you men can’t get along
without capital. When anybody comes
along and tells you that capital and labor can’t get along together, that man
is your worst enemy. We are getting along friendly enough here in this mine
right now, and there is no reason why you men cannot get along with the
managers of my company when I am back in New York
There
you have it, another shining example of capitalist benevolence in action.
Despite the paternalism, every worker right and benefit we have was
literally bought with the blood of union men and women fighting tooth and nail
against overwhelming odds to win them and often dying in the process.
And you
know when private companies stopped killing the strikers? When FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT troops (ordered by President Wilson) stepped in. In the libertarian wet dream world of
Rand Paul and the Koch Brothers, we would be back to 12 hour days, 6 days a
week.
We
could argue whether or not a different approach in the 1870s would have been
better, but in today’s world, the massing of capital that has occurred among multinational
corporations can only be balanced by strong government power, provided that
politicians are willing to use that power. Shrinking government can only be in
the interest of the average citizen if the power of massed capital is reduced to
a point that it is less than the power of government to control it.
In March, the Wrongologist alerted
readers to Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism
in the 21st Century. Paul Krugman, in his review of Piketty’s book for the NY
Review of Books said:
big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just
gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a
path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the
economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties
A
rising level of capital to total wealth concentrates power, because ownership of capital is always
much more unequally distributed than labor income.
We
have come full circle, entering another “Gilded Age”. The plutocrats, corporatists
and corporations argue for the primacy of capital over people, and many, many of our politicians
support that call.
If politics is about power, then the
powerful will have the advantage. We will see an endless loop of the more
powerful crushing the less powerful, with any
change in the power balance just a random fluke, like what happened after Ludlow catalyzed
real change.
If politics can be about policy,
then truth has an advantage, and progress can happen.
